Burritos, AI art, corporate fascism
Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day: “You ordered a private taxi for your burrito.” Also: " … AI art is the aesthetic of 21st-century fascism the same way Italian Futurism was in the last century."
Also: “The Washington Post as a tool of fascism:”
As Juniper wrote on Bluesky, “I think everyone needs to stop framing what’s going on as ‘bending the knee’ and what’s really happening which is ‘they’re finally feel free to do what they’ve always wanted to do.’”
Oh, and by the way, totally unrelated. I’m still working my way through The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I just got to the section where all the German industrialists that supported Adolf Hitler’s rise to power because he was anti-union get their companies nationalized and they all get thrown in jail.
More than a billion people now watch podcasts on YouTube every month. This seems bonkers to me. Podcasts aren’t for watching. They’re for listening to, while walking the dog, driving or doing chores around the house. And yet YouTube is apparently now the most popular podcast platform by far.
Prominent military contractors, including former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, pitched a plan for mass deportations calling for ‘processing camps’ and a private citizen ‘army’.
“The idea of forcibly removing 12 million people from the United States is not just operationally impossible — it is a moral and economic catastrophe in the making,” said Jason Houser, former ICE chief of staff in the Biden administration.
RIP Michelle Trachtenberg, 39. She played “Dawn,” the younger sister on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and also appeared as a villain on “Gossip Girl.” Her death is apparently from natural causes. She recently had a liver transplant.
A company looks to relaunch the commercial airship business with a design that looks like a flying butt
A British company hopes to launch commercial airships to carry cargo and up to 130 passengers on relatively short trips, replacing regional airlines and ferries.
This is very cool, but it feels like I have read an article like this every five years, and the businesses never take off (so to speak). Airships seem to be just plain impractical.
I downloaded about 250 of my purchased Kindle ebooks, roughly a third of my collection. And now it appears Amazon has shut that option down.
I’ve been a loyal Kindle customer for 14 years, and Amazon gave me (and its other customers) a “fuck you” in return.
(Relatively) easy instructions for downloading Kindle ebooks before the deadline, which is today or tomorrow
From the Department of Doing Thing at the Last Minute: I think I was able to successfully use these instructions to batch-download all my Kindle books before Amazon switches off that capability tonight or tomorrow. The instructions require installing the Tampermonkey Chrome extension, cutting-and-pasting a script into the extension’s configuration window and then letting the script run in the background.
As I type this, the script has been running for four hours and is only a third of the way through. That’s OK; I can just let it run in the background until it’s done.
I had previously found these instructions, which require more advanced command-line skills than I possess.
Sucks that Amazon can get away with making this change. I am far less likely to buy more ebooks from them after this rugpull.
“AITA for refusing to let my girlfriend bring her dead dog’s ashes on vacation?" 100% he’s the asshole.
Archaeologists discovered fossilized footprints and tracks suggesting the oldest known use of a handcart. The discovery illuminates life at the end of the last ice age about 23,000 years ago